by Gbolahan Ayoola

In my previous article, The Fragility of Memory, I reflected on the disappearance of culturally significant sites and the consequences of losing the physical traces of our collective past. The responses that followed were both encouraging and thought-provoking. They revealed a shared concern about preservation, but more importantly, they raised a deeper question: How do we determine what is worth preserving in the first place?

This question has occupied my thoughts in recent weeks.

Preservation begins with recognition. Before a site, object, building, or tradition can be protected, it must first be understood as significant. Yet this process of identification is rarely straightforward. It requires us to examine the various ways societies store, transmit, and authenticate memory.

For many years, discussions about history in Africa have often been framed through a false choice between oral tradition and material evidence. One side argues that oral history is sufficient. The other insists that only archaeological evidence can provide reliable historical understanding. In reality, both positions are incomplete.

A society’s memory rarely exists in one place.

It exists simultaneously in stories, rituals, landscapes, architecture, artefacts, archives, and systems of knowledge that have survived across generations.

Oral tradition remains one of Africa’s most remarkable intellectual inheritances. Through stories, praise poetry, songs, proverbs, and communal narratives, historical knowledge has been transmitted for centuries. Entire genealogies, migration histories, political developments, and cultural values have survived because communities chose to remember them.

Yet oral history is not immune to change. Memory is shaped by perspective, repetition, politics, geography, and time. Different communities may preserve different versions of the same event. As generations pass, details may be forgotten, modified, or reinterpreted.

This does not diminish the value of oral tradition. Rather, it reveals the importance of complementing it with other forms of evidence.

Material culture performs a different function. Buildings, artefacts, shrines, settlement patterns, burial sites, and archaeological remains provide physical testimony to human activity. They offer another way of reading the past, one that can support, challenge, or expand inherited narratives.

What becomes most valuable is not one form of evidence over another, but the point at which multiple forms of evidence converge.

The identification of cultural heritage often emerges through the interaction of several sources: oral testimony from communities and custodians of memory; historical documentation where it exists; architectural and material uniqueness; association with significant people, events, or rituals; and continuity of cultural practice across generations.

Within the Yoruba context, there is an additional source that deserves more sustained consideration.

Ifá.

Often discussed primarily as a spiritual system, Ifá can also be understood as a repository of cultural knowledge and historical consciousness. Through the Odù corpus, generations have preserved narratives relating to migration, settlement, leadership, morality, and communal identity. Certain Odù are understood to contain accounts that speak directly to the origins and development of particular communities and traditions.

A concrete example illustrates this. The founding and spiritual naming of Ipetumodu in Osun State is directly tied to the Odù Ifá known as Ogbe Meji, celebrated in Ifá cosmology as the first of the major Odù. The name Ipetumodu itself is a contraction of the phrase “A pa etu bo Odu”, meaning “the one who kills an antelope to sacrifice to Odu”, linking the town’s identity directly to its founding narrative. That narrative is corroborated by the royal house whose ancestors have carried the same history for centuries. The Odu did not invent that history. It preserved it in a structured, repeatable form that has survived because communities continued to return to it.

This is the crucial distinction: what the Odu does is corroborate, not determine. Like any ancient text, it should not be read uncritically. But neither should it be dismissed. It functions as one layer within a multi-source system of verification, one whose significance becomes clearest when it aligns with other forms of evidence.

Like oral history, Ifa should not be approached as a simple chronological record. Rather, it functions as a structured system through which memory, interpretation, and identity are transmitted over time.

Cultural memory is not stored in a single archive. It is distributed across many forms of knowledge. The challenge before us is learning how to read them together.

A recent example illustrates why this matters.

The demolition of the traditional palace in Ipetumodu generated discussion about cultural preservation and heritage protection. Beyond its physical structure, the palace represented a tangible link between generations. It embodied indigenous architectural practices, traditional authority, and communal memory.

Its loss was not merely architectural. 

It was historical. 

It was cultural. 

It was symbolic. 

The former palace of Ipetumodu holding archives and architectural history that should have been preserved; completed in 1974 but was demolished in 2024.

What makes such cases particularly troubling is that recognition often arrives after destruction. By the time public attention turns toward a site, the opportunity for meaningful conservation may already have passed.

Yet while the case of Ipetumodu reveals the consequences of inadequate preservation, another example reveals a different but equally significant challenge.

The challenge of public indifference to discovery itself.

I encountered this challenge through an Instagram post — an image of samples from an ancient paved road uncovered at the Ita Yemoo site in Ile-Ife. The work was being conducted by Professors Gérard Chouin and Adisa Ogunfolakan. What surprised me was not merely the significance of the research, but the fact that such work has been ongoing for years without attracting widespread national attention.

What followed was a series of conversations that deepened my understanding considerably. I spoke with Dr Abidemi Babatunde Babalola, an archaeologist whose own research has focused on the history of ancient glass production within Ife land. Work that has transformed scholarly understanding of Yoruba craft, trade networks, and technological achievement. Through these conversations, I learned that while Chouin and Ogunfolakan’s investigations gained visibility around 2015, archaeological work at Ita Yemoo and the broader Ile-Ife landscape extends as far back as excavations conducted between 1959 and 1961. The site has been known to the scholarly community for decades. It has simply not been known to the rest of us.

For many Nigerians, the name Ita Yemoo carries little meaning. Yet the site occupies an important position within the historical landscape of Ile-Ife and is associated with traditions surrounding Ooni Luwo Gbagida, often remembered as the only female Ooni in Yoruba history.

I had been told this story before orally about a ruler who built Ile-Ife with the ambition and rigour of an urban planner. Who introduced paved roads. Who organised communal sanitation. Who shaped the built environment of a city with a vision that was civic as much as it was sacred. The physical evidence uncovered at Ita Yemoo did not contradict that story. It confirmed it. It was the moment oral history and material evidence converged.

That convergence is not a small thing. It is precisely what has been missing from how many of us understand our own past.

This discovery forced me to confront an uncomfortable question: how can archaeological investigations capable of expanding our understanding of identity, history, governance, urban development, and cultural achievement remain largely unknown within the society to which they belong? 

The issue here is not a lack of research. The issue is a lack of attention.

For decades, scholars have dedicated themselves to uncovering aspects of our past. Excavations in Ile-Ife have transformed scholarly understanding of Yoruba civilisation. Research into ancient glass production, trade networks, metallurgy, urban organisation, and material culture has challenged long-standing assumptions about African history.

Yet these discoveries often remain confined to academic journals, conferences, and specialist circles.

Egypt is the exception, not the standard. Its archaeological heritage is central to a deliberate national project one sustained by government investment, public education, and cultural policy. An average Egyptian can situate their identity within a chronological history backed by physical evidence. The same is true of Greece. What we must ask ourselves is why the same cannot yet be said of Yoruba civilisation, not because the evidence does not exist, but because it has not been made accessible.

If the evidence of who we are remains inaccessible to the people whose identity it concerns, then preservation alone cannot solve the problem.

A society cannot preserve what it does not value. And it cannot value what it does not understand.

This, perhaps, is where the conversation must evolve.

The challenge before us is not simply the conservation of buildings or the protection of archaeological sites. It is the cultivation of a culture that recognises the importance of evidence itself.

A culture that sees archaeology not as an obscure academic pursuit but as a vital tool for understanding who we are.

A culture that recognises oral tradition as an archive of memory while also embracing material evidence as an essential companion in the search for historical understanding.

A culture that understands that identity is not inherited automatically. It is continuously constructed through investigation, interpretation, preservation, and transmission.

This responsibility cannot rest solely with archaeologists, historians, traditional institutions, or government agencies.

It belongs to all of us. 

Researchers uncover evidence. Communities preserve memory. Institutions provide protection. Educators transmit knowledge. Artists create new pathways through which history can be encountered and understood.

It is worth saying something more directly about what that last role requires.

The Osogbo school understood it. What drew me to those artists and particularly to the theatre practitioners, to Duro Ladipo, Twins Seven Seven, Oyin Adejobi — was their recognition that folklore is oral history, and that performance is one of the most powerful channels through which history can be made felt rather than merely known. When Duro Ladipo costumed himself as Sango and performed before an audience, he was not simply entertaining. He was making centuries of transmitted memory visceral and immediate for a generation that might otherwise have encountered it only as abstraction. He brought it into the body.

I see my own work as operating within that tradition, while directing it toward a different subject. My subject is not myth. It is the physical, verifiable foundations of who we are.

The making of each work in the Cultural Foundations series unfolds in four distinct stages. It begins with the careful drawing of a grid structure a framework that serves as both foundation and archive. The grid is not a formal gesture borrowed from the history of Western modernism. It comes directly from archaeological methodology. When archaeologists excavate a site, they first lay a grid over the area to organise and document what will be uncovered. That discipline, that systematic attention to structure before anything else, is what each painting begins with.

The second stage involves painting each individual section of the grid, allowing colour and form to emerge through deliberate acts of construction. This is followed by the application of pastel layers, which introduce depth, texture, and a sense of temporal sedimentation the accumulation of time made visible. Finally, the surface is completed through mark-making: gestures, symbols, and interventions that act as fragments of memory embedded within the work.

The painting process and the archaeological process are, in this sense, the same process. Both move through layers to find what is foundational. Both require a structured framework before anything can be uncovered. The work is not illustrating archaeological research. It is performing it.

Chronology disrupted 2024.

What art can do that a journal article cannot is make someone feel the stakes personally. The scholars are doing the excavation. The role of the artist is transmission, to take what has been uncovered and make it matter to people who will never read an academic paper, who may not yet know what lies beneath the ground they walk on daily. To make the case, not just intellectually but emotionally, that this history belongs to them.

In this sense, contemporary art can function as more than representation. It can become a bridge between memory and evidence, between research and public engagement, between what has been forgotten and what still remains to be discovered.

The question, therefore, is not simply what we choose to preserve.

The more urgent question is whether we are prepared to cultivate the curiosity necessary to recognise value before it disappears.

Because cultural foundations are not only threatened by destruction.

Sometimes they are threatened by indifference.

And indifference, unlike demolition, often leaves no visible ruins behind.

Gbolahan Ayoola 

Artist & Writer, Lagos, Nigeria 

gbolahanayoola.com